


Death in her eyes

by Orlha



Series: Lightning on the Wind's blade [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Bad Decisions, Canon-Typical Violence, Clan Politics, Depression, Fugaku is actually a nice guy, Gen, Misunderstood Fugaku, Sakumo makes a brief appearance, Uchiha Clan-centric, War
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-09-20 04:29:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17015748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orlha/pseuds/Orlha
Summary: Dancing Devil Sayami rose to legendary status in Second Shinobi War at the age of 9.  It's in the Third Shinobi War where her bingo page was updated to 'flee on sight'.Uchiha Sayami, the Uchiha that hated being one, navigating Clan politics to free herself. And this is her story.This is companion piece to 'Bones beneath her feet'.





	1. The Last One Alive

It's the white ceiling she sees when Sayami wakes up from the nightmare. There's a persistent headache that seems to scrape the sides of her head every time it throbs, her arm is cast in a thick, white plaster, just like her left foot.

Training is going to suck so bad is the first thing she thinks when she inspects her body status, only to remember how she landed up here. Sayami remembers the terror of the battlefield, remembers slewing her first kill and later many others, she also remembers losing her sensei and her two other teammates.

What is the point of getting up if there's nothing to?, The grief that sunk beneath her consciousness now surfaces, bubbling like a pot of acid. Should have been her instead. It was her the Iwa had come for, after all.

Not in the first time of her life, Sayami resented herself for being an Uchiha. She turns in the sorry excuse of a bed and screams into the pillow. It hurts, not a physical hurt but the grief and guilt almost feels physical.  Should have been her. She struggles for a gasp of air, the monster dragging her further down into its lair. They died for her, they died _because_ of her.

_Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry._

The word that will never be enough, echos inaudibly in her head. No words to appease the clenching in her chest or the burning in her throat. Sayami chokes into the cotton, perhaps if she just suffocated herself here. If she just-

“Kid, you okay?” a gruff voice asks out from the behind her. A bed -  several beds actually -  crammed into one room. Wartime always had been hard on hospital space.

She had been too far in her thoughts to notice the chakra presences around her. Not that it mattered. She’s alive and they are still dead.

“Don't be stupid Sakumo, she just woke up after shattering almost her entire left leg and right arm. Of course she's not,” a female voice chides and a pillow with unerring accuracy flies through the air, decking the man whose bed is right beside Sayami. He grunts and she hears him adjusts his position.

The woman isn’t quite right, but she’s not wrong either. It’s not the pain of her leg or arm that hurts, because nothing would be worse than the gaping hole in her chest.

Sayami forces herself up. She has to go, has to tell her superior about what happened, have to make their sacrifice not in vain. She’ll never be enough make up for it. Why was she an Uchiha? If she hadn’t had the blasted eyes, they would never been attacked. Koichi and Hatsu would have been still alive, Minamoto-sensei would still be alive. A wave of chakra floods behind her eyes, her heart pounds fiercely as a warm viscous liquid slides down her cheek.

“Turn it off,” the acerbic words from a familiar voice commands. The white mask stares down at her then raising his hand, he slaps her so hard that her head snaps to the side. “Sayami-chan, are you back with me?”

She takes a breath, her words sounding like mix between a snort and a sob. “Ji-chan?”

“Yes.” The bird anbu peels his mask off, latching it onto his belt. His lips thin with concern as he sets his hand on her shoulder, squeezing it. “Turn it off.” His words are no less sharp but she can hear the softness in it.

Sayami closes her eyes, willing the chakra away from them. Even now, she can still see her team dying behind her eyelids. “Are you here for my report?” She won’t blame Fugaku-jichan for being late, or for the reinforcements for being late. There is no one else to blame except herself for being born an Uchiha.

_Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry._

She wipes the tear off her face, startling at the bright crimson on her palm. Tears of blood?

“Congratulations. You have awoken your mangekyou,” Fugaku says but the tones he speaks with are not that of a congratulatory tone. They are sad, heavy with pain and guilt, like his eyes, just like the weight in her chest.

✥.✥.✥

Fugaku-ji had to go back to the frontlines eventually. Sayami didn’t doubt that he would have stayed if he could. Even in the burrow of blankets that she has hidden herself from the world, Sayami hears of the war outside growing fiercer and fiercer day by day. Her father leaves to join the war efforts and she is left alone. She is a nine year-old chuunin, perfectly able to look after herself. Or should have been.

_Should have been me. Why isn’t it me?_

There are days where Sayami can’t find it in herself to even get out of bed to use the bathroom, let alone cook. Something in her is broken, gaping with its callous claws. Sometimes she begs for her body to stop breathing.

_Please, please, please._

Her body, the traitor, still breathes even when she’s given up.

“Get up.”

The blankets are ripped from her and she realises she’s exposed to the cold winter’s air.

_When has it turned to winter?_

“Come on.”

A rough hand tugs Sayami up and off the bed, depositing her onto the freezing floor. The ceiling isn’t white, it’s grey-blue and dingy. There is plaster is peeling off the sides of the wall. It’s not the same room she remembers waking up to, she realises this belatedly. It’s her bedroom with windows that aren’t big enough for Koichi and Hatsu to jump through. They always complained, forced to perch on the tree outside her room instead. Like birds, they said.

_Koichi and Hatsu are dead._

Sayami sobs, feeling her Sharingan flicker on from the ragged edge of her emotions. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Her hands shake as she presses her palm into her eyes. She’s drowning from the shame of being the one alive. “Should have been me. Been me instead. Should have tried harder.”

“Don’t blame yourself for being the one alive.” A large hand peels her hands away and a wet towel scrubs her face clean. The face that appears in her vision is Fugaku-ji, looking more tired than she ever remembers him to be. The frown lines on his face have deepened since the last time she saw him, making him look thirty instead of eighteen.  

“Don’t ever be sorry for being alive,” he tells her brusquely. “You hear me?” Fugaku shakes her until she nods, even if it’s just to get him to stop shaking her, then he holds her tight. He doesn’t cry. _Uchiha men don’t cry._ But she knows inside he’s crying.

“Is he dead too?” she asks. Her father is only one _he_ left in her life apart from Fugaku.

He stays silent. The dark shadows beneath his eyes and haunted look tells her all that she needs. Sayami takes a deep long breath and takes his proffered hand to pull herself upright. With the growing war, she’ll be back onto the battlefield soon. Perhaps that isn’t so bad, she thinks. If she has to pick a way to go, it’d be in a fight.

 


	2. End of the 2nd Shinobi war

The first time Sayami uses her mangekyou after activating it, is to rescue her new teammates from an overwhelmingly outnumbered battle. Her teammates, two chuunins and one jounin, are her only backups when she lets her red eyes shape into the mangekyou. It burns into her skull like a branding iron and she takes it with shame. The invidious eyes, that was bought with the death of her precious people, would save her and her new teammates is such an irony that she can’t help but crack a smile.

Sayami dances through the thirty-two kiri-nins with lithe ease, her red eyes almost luminous in the rising sun that they call her Dancing Devil Eyes.

The Devil dances with a tanto, they say.

She kills twenty-three kiri-nins that day.

The power behind her eyes still sears like a burning fire but the shame of having it is, perhaps, a little lesser.

“Every time you use it, you’ll lose a bit of your vision,” Fugaku-jiisan warns her. Sayami finds that she doesn’t mind being blind if it means no one she knows will die again.

✥.✥.✥

It’s in the battle of plains when Sayami figures out her mangekyou’s power. Her mangekyou vision always bring strange lines and double images. She uses her tanto to trace the lines out, her feet are quick, the grass barely swaying from her motions. It feels like time has stopped for her and her enemies fall in pieces from her tracing.

“What happened?” her new jounin leader asks staring in disbelief.

Sayami thinks the lines are main chakra points, she thinks that by severing those points, it has caused a fatal feedback. Already, the whispers of how she is death in a little girl’s body follows her wherever she goes. So she shrugs and says, “I don’t know,” instead. The lies burn on her tongue like acid, but she doesn’t need anyone to know about her new ability. Sayami turns to look at her jounin leader, seeing the lines run down his tall frame. Shikaku-san, she thinks his name is. This, she is not sure. Her previous new team had died a few months back as well. Maybe she _is_ cursed like they murmur behind her back.

There isn’t time for Shikaku-san to grill her obvious lie. The kiri-nins are advancing down the plains. They turn back to the kiri-nins, her hand is wiping and smearing the trickle of blood from her eye across her cheek like war paint. Sayami readies her tanto.

“Try not to die,” she hears Shikaku-san say, she’s fairly certain that he’s called Shikaku by now. “Fugaku will have my hide if you do and that’s troublesome,” he says with a loud sigh. His long fingers moulds seals and his shadow looms, snaring the kiri-nins and spearing them.

“I think it’s you that should be worried,” Sayami replies. “After all I’m the Dead Teammate Sayami.” Her tanto slices through the lines with ease, the enemies falling dead faster than prior to finding out what her new eyes do.

There are black dots dancing across her vision. Sayami wonders if she’ll have to learn how to kill while blind by the time the war ends. Probably, and she’s willing to pay the cost. For Koichi and Hatsu, for Minamoto-sensei. Even now, she still thinks she doesn’t deserve to live.

✥.✥.✥

Sayami doesn’t know how long she’s been killing. The kiri-nins scuttle like rats and each she kills is replaced by another. Her muscles are aching, her chakra is running drier than she knows is healthy. Just a little longer, she’s been reiterating in her head. The blood on her cheek dribbles down more than Sayami would like it to. She has even given up wiping it away. The ninjas in the trenches behind her are just genins - even if they are her age. She’ll be dead before she lets one of them through.  

Sayami flips back, hoof kicking the jaw out of the ninja on her left. Her tanto goes low, slicing his tendons, watching him flail helplessly on the blood soaked ground. Then she pulls a breath, flicking the blood off her tanto. It’s no longer day, or was it night when the battle started? The leaves of the far side of the Hashirama trees wave in the stifling air, the eyes of the crouching genins in the trenches seem to gleam expectantly. She can barely feel the pulse of her chakra as she turns back to the remaining enemy-nins.

 _‘Just a little longer-_ ’ she murmurs and suddenly she’s picked up and shaken like a bad little puppy.

“That’s enough, Sayami-chan. Time to turn off those mangekyou eyes. Fugaku instructed me that you can use them no more than two hours a day.” Shikaku tells her.

It’s a bit late for that, she thinks. They had been in battle for long enough for the sun to rise and set again. Or maybe it hasn’t and she had just lost track of time. And what kind of ninja would listen to that kind of instructions, she scoffs mentally. Not taking a no for an answer, Shikaku shakes her again, this time harder until she concedes. Her vision delineates for a moment before fading into a dull blur.

“Good, now let’s head back to the rest spot. Our backups can take care of the rest.”

“They are _genins_ ,” she tells Shikaku though she really means that they are children. There aren’t that many kiri-nins left standing by now, but their backups are _children_ and while that sounded hypocritical even to her ears, she had been out in knee-deep bodies for a year now.

“They have their jounin-sensei with them.” His hand goes around her bicep and shunshins them out before she can protest further.

“I could still fight,” she insists petulantly.

“You could, if you were planning to die there.” His dark brown eyes seemed to pierce the distance that she’s created between them. Her previous team after her genin team hadn’t cared to bridge the gap and she hadn’t let them to either.

Sayami doesn’t respond to his words. “It’s okay, you know?” he says. “It’s okay to be the last one alive.”

✥.✥.✥

Shikaku is the only teammate survives when the second shinobi war comes to a close.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr ate my blog and refused to give it back, so there's no tumblr now... :(  
> If you like to chat with me, hit me up on the [Genjutsu Support discord Group](https://discord.gg/cEE8Rj8)


End file.
